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Shortly before Christmas 2015 was the TFS 2015 Update 1 released, within this release are some new features that bring more productivity to Team Development and DevOps.

Here are some of my favorites :

TFVC and Git in the same Team Project

Lots of my customers have TFVC (centralized version control) in TFS. When Git support came out, the only option they had if they wanted to switch to Git was to create a new “Git-based” Team Project and port source code over. Then they got into a horrible situation where work items were all in the TFVC Team Project, and the source code was in the new Git Team Project.

Now, you can simply add a new Git repo to an existing TFVC Team Project! Navigate to the Code hub in Web Access, click the repository drop-down (in the top left of the Code pane) and select “New Repository”:

Enter the name of your repo and click Create. You’ll see the new “Empty Git page” (with a handy “Clone in Visual Studio” button):

The Repository drop-down now shows multiple repos, each with their corresponding TFVC or Git icon:

You can also add TFVC to a Git Team Project! This makes sense if you want to source control large assets. That way you can have your code in Git, and then source control your assets in TFVC, all in the same team project.

If you’re looking for alternatives to supporting large files in Git, then you’ll be pleased to note that VSO supports Git-LFS. Unfortunately, it’s not in this CTP – though it is planned for the Update 1 Release. As a matter of interest, the real issue is the NTLM authentication support for Git-LFS – the product team are going to submit a PR to the GitHub Git-LFS repo so that it should be supported by around the time Update 1 releases.

Query and Notifications on Kanban Column

Customizing Kanban columns is great – no messing in the XML WITD files – just open the settings, map the Kanban column to the work item states, and you’re good to go. But what if you want to query on Kanban column – or get a notification if a work item moves to a particular column? Until now, you couldn’t.

If you open a work item query editor, you’ll see three additional fields that you can query on:

Board Column – which column the board is in. Bear in mind that the same work item could be in different columns for different teams.

Board Column Done – corresponding to the “Doing/Done” split

Board Lane – the swimlane that the work item is in

Not only can you query on these columns, but you can also add alerts using these fields. That way you could, for example, create an alert for “Stories moved to Done in the Testing column in the Expedite Lane”.

Pull Requests in Team Explorer

You’ll need Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 for this to work. Once you have Update 1, you’ll be able to see and create Pull Requests in the Team Explorer Pull Requests tile. You can also filter PRs and select between Active, Completed and Abandoned PRs. There are PRs you’ve created as well as PRs assigned to you or your team. Clicking a PR opens it up in Web Access:

Team Board Enhancements

There’s a lot to discuss under this heading. If you’re using the Kanban boards, you’ll want to upgrade just for these enhancements.

Team Board Settings Dialog

The Board Settings Dialog has been revamped. Now you can customize the cards, columns, CFD and team settings from a single place – not a single “admin” page in sight! Just click the gear icon on the top right of a Backlog board, and the Settings dialog appears:

Field Settings

TFS 2015 RTM introduced field customization, so not much has changed here. There’s an additional setting that allows you to show/hide empty fields – if you’ve got a lot of cards, hiding empty fields makes the cards smaller where possible, allowing more cards on the board than before.

Customisable Styles

You can now set conditional styling on the cards. For example, I’ve added some style rules that color my cards red (redder and reddest) depending on the risk:

You can drag/drop the rules (they fire in order) and of course you can rules for multiple fields and conditions. You can change the card color and/or the title color (and font style) if the condition matches. Here’s my board after setting the styles:

Tag Coloring

You can now colorize your tags. You can see the iPhone and WindowsPhone tags colored in the board above because of these settings:

Team Board Settings

Under board settings, you’ll be able to customize the Columns (and their state mappings, Doing/Done split, and Definition of Done. Again you’ll see a drag/drop theme allowing you to re-order columns.

The same applies to the swimlanes configuration.

As a bonus, you can rename a Kanban column directly on the board by clicking the hearer:

Charts and General

Under “Charts” and “General” you’ll be able to configure the CFD chart as well as the Backlogs (opt in/out of backlogs), Working Days and how your bugs appear (Backlogs or Task boards or neither). These settings used to be scattered around the UI, so it’s great to have a single place to set all of these options.

Tasks as Checklists

If you use Tasks as checklists, then this is a great new feature. Each Story (or Requirement or PBI, depending on your template) card now shows how may child Tasks it has. Clicking on the indicator opens up the checklist view:

You can drag/drop to reorder, check to mark complete and add new items.

Task Board Enhancements

The Task board also gets some love – conditional styling (just like the Kanban cards) as well as the ability to add a Task to a Story inline.

More Activities Per Team Member

You can now set multiple activities per team member. I’ve always thought that this feature has been pretty limited without this ability:

Now you have a real reason to use the Activity field on the Task! The Task burn down now also shows actual capacity in addition to the ideal trend:

As a bonus, you can now also add new Team members directly from the Capacity page – without having to open up the Team administration page.

Team Dashboards

The “old” Home page (or Team Landing page) let you have a spot to pin charts or queries or build tiles. However, you couldn’t really customize how widgets were positioned, and if you had a lot of favorites, the page got a little cluttered. Enter Dashboards. You can now create a number of Dashboards and customize exactly which widgets appear (and where). Here I’m creating a new “Bugs” dashboard that will only show Bug data. Once you’ve created the Dashboard, just click the big green “+” icon on the lower right to add widgets:

Once you’ve added a couple of widgets, you can drag/drop them around to customize where they appear. Some widgets require configuration – like this “Query Tile” widget, where I am selecting which query to show as well as title and background color:

Here I’m customizing the Query widget:

You can see how the widgets actually preview the changes as you set them.

To add charts to a Dashboard, you need to go to the Work|Queries pane, then select the chart and add it to the Dashboard from the fly-out menu:

Similarly, to add a Build widget to the Dashboard you need to navigate to builds and add it to the Dashboard of your choice from the list of Builds on the left.

Now I have a really cool looking Bugs Dashboard!

Test Result Retention Policies

There is a tool for cleaning up test results (the Test Attachment cleaner in the TFS Power Tools) – but most users only use this when space starts running low. Now you can set retention policies that allow TFS to clean up old run, results and attachments automatically. Open up the administration page and navigate to the Test tab:

Team Queries: Project-Scoping Work Item Types and States

If you have multiple Team Projects, and at least one of them uses a different template, then you’ll know that it can be a real pain when querying, since you get all the work item types and all the states – even if you don’t need them. For example, I’ve got a Scrum project and an Agile project. In RTM, when I created a query in the Agile project, the Work Item types drop-down lists Product Backlog items too (even though they’ll never be in my Agile Team Project). Now, by default, only Work Item Type (and States) that appear in your Team Project show in the drop-down lists. If you want to see other work item types, then you’re doing a “cross-Project” query and there’s an option to turn that on (“Query across projects”) to the top-right of the query editor:

Policies for Work Item Branch

Now, in addition to Build and Code Review policies for Pull Requests in Git branch policies, you can also require that the commits are linked to work items:

You can also just link the PR to a work item to fulfill the policy.

Labeling and Client-site workspace mapping in Builds

The build agent gets an update, and there are some refreshed Tasks (including SonarQube begin and end tasks). More importantly, you can now label your sources on (all or just successful) builds:

Also, if you’re building from a TFVC repo, you can now customize the workspace mapping:

And Stay tuned, because will come some other features in Update 2 that are in VSO now like :

Build widgets in the catalog

As Karen wrote about in the dashboards futures blog, one area we’re focusing on is improving the discoverability and ease in bringing different charts to your dashboard. With this update, you’ll see a new option to add a build history chart from the dashboard catalog, and you’ll be able to configure the build definition displayed directly from the dashboard.

Markdown widget with file from repository

The first version of the markdown widget allowed custom markdown stored inside the widget. You can now choose to display any markdown file in your existing repository.

Or add the file to any dashboard in your team project directly from the Code Explorer.

Check out all the January features in detail for Visual Studio Team Services:

After few months , when was announced that Prism over to new owners. The Pattern And Practices Team spend some of time and effort into identifying needs and vision around Unity and owners that would invest in the project and support the community.

Going Forward

Be sure to read the official announcement from the new team and follow their work on the new GitHub repo. Let them know what you’d like to see in future releases of Unity and help them continue to grow the community

This is kind of like how you can get Adobe Creative Cloud or Office 365, if you’re familiar with that. You pay a monthly or yearly fee like Office 365 and get Visual Studio and a bunch of other benefits.

And if you’re doing really serious IoT or embedded work, native Android libraries, Linux kernel modules, or small boards like Raspberry PIs, check out http://visualgdb.com which is an amazing and very complete 3rd party add in for Visual Studio!

If you’re doing Arduino development, check out http://www.visualmicro.comwhich has a brand new version and really lights up Visual Studio with some powerful features like an automatic Arduino Board Downloader.

Backlog looks Fancy and have more features that can be used on Planning meetings

Some of the my favorites that where in VSO for a while now are :

Version control: use Git and Team Foundation Version Control in the same project, history and getting started improvements on the web portal, social #ID in pull requests, commit details summary is easier to read, and an improved experience for cloning Git repositories.

Backlogs: multi-select on all backlogs, drag any item to an iteration from anywhere, Add panel on the iteration backlog, line on the burndown indicates actual capacity, configure settings directly, add/remove users in the sprint plan, and multiple activities per team member in planning capacity for a sprint.

This Year like every year hosts ppedv AG – www.adc.ms/15 the Advanced Developer Conference in Mannheim with a Interesting Content and Speaker list where you can find TOP Quality Microsoft and Microsoft Community speakers like :

Technical debt is the set of problems in a development effort that make forward progress on customer value inefficient. Technical debt saps productivity by making code hard to understand, fragile, difficult to validate, and creates unplanned work that blocks progress. Technical debt is insidious. It starts small and grows over time through rushed changes, lack of context and lack of discipline. Organizations often find that more than 50% of their capacity is sapped by technical debt.

SonarQube is an open source platform that is the de facto solution for understanding and managing technical debt.

Customers have been telling us and SonarSource, the company behind SonarQube, that the SonarQube analysis of .Net apps and integration with Microsoft build technologies needs to be considerably improved.

Over the past few months we have been collaborating with our friends from SonarSource and are pleased to make available a set of integration components that allow you to configure a Team Foundation Server (TFS) Build to connect to a SonarQube server and send the following data, which is gathered during a build under the governance of quality profiles and gates defined on the SonarQube server.

results of .Net and JavaScript code analysis

code clone analysis

code coverage data from tests

metrics for .Net and JavaScript

We have initially targeted TFS 2013 and above, so customers can try out these bits immediately with code and build definitions that they already have. We have tried using the above bits with builds in Visual Studio Online (VSO), using an on-premises build agent, but we have uncovered a bug around the discovery of code coverage data which we are working on resolving. When this is fixed we’ll send out an update on this blog. We are also working on integration with the next generation of build in VSO and TFS.

In addition, SonarSource have produced a set of .Net rules, written using the new Roslyn-based code analysis framework, and published them in two forms: a nuget package and a VSIX. With this set of rules, the analysis that is done as part of build can also be done live inside Visual Studio 2015, exploiting the new Visual Studio 2015 code analysis experience

We are also grateful to our ever-supportive ALM Rangers who have, in parallel, written a SonarQube Installation Guide, which explains how to set up a production ready SonarQube installation to be used in conjunction with Team Foundation Server 2013 to analyse .Net apps. This includes reference to the new integration components mentioned above.

This is only the start of our collaboration. We have lots of exciting ideas on our backlog, so watch this space.

As always, we’d appreciate your feedback on how you find the experience and ideas about how it could be improved to help you and your teams deliver higher quality and easier to maintain software more efficiently.

Today @Build conference is announced the release of Visual Studio 2015 RC. This version includes many new features and updates, such as tools for Universal Windows app development, cross-platform mobile development for iOS, Android, and Windows, including Xamarin, Apache Cordova, and Unity, portable C++ libraries, native activity C++ templates for Android, and more.

Windows Holgografic is another Announcement regarding the vision of HoloLense and integration with all from IOC to Home Media .

Important: Most applications you build with Visual Studio 2015 RC are considered “go-live” and can be redistributed and used in production settings as outlined in the license agreement. However, those that are built for Windows 10 cannot be distributed or uploaded to the Windows Store. Instead, you will have to rebuild applications built for Windows 10 by using the final version of Visual Studio 2015 before submitting to the Windows Store. Also, please note that ASP.NET 5 is still in preview and is not recommended for production use at this time. You are free to use ASP.NET 4.6 in production.

Last November, Microsoft said that it would bring some of the core features of its .NET platform — which has traditionally been Windows-only — to Linux and Mac. Today, at its Build developer conference, the company announced its first full preview of the .NET Core runtime for Linux and Mac OS X.

In addition, Microsoft is making the release candidate of the full .NET framework for Windows available to developers today.

The highlight here, though, is obviously the release of .NET Core for platforms other than Windows. As Microsoft VP of its developer division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me earlier this week, the company now aims to meet developers where they are — instead of necessarily making them use Windows — and .NET Core is clearly part of this move.

Microsoft says it is taking .NET cross-platform in order to build and leverage a bigger ecosystem for it. As the company also noted shortly after the original announcement, it decided that, to take .NET cross-platform, it had to do so as an open source project. To shepherd it going forward, Microsoft also launched the .NET Foundation last year.

While it’s still somewhat of a shock for some to see Microsoft active in the open-source world, it’s worth remembering that that the company has made quite a few contributions to open source projects lately.

Even before the .NET framework announcement, the company had already open-sourced theRoslyn .NET Compiler platform. Earlier this year, Microsoft shuttered its MS OpenTechsubsidiary, which was mostly responsible for its open source projects, in order to bring these projects into the overall Microsoft fold.

With this ebook, the ALM Rangers share their best practices in managing solution requirements and shipping solutions in an agile environment, an environment where transparency, simplicity, and trust prevail. The ebook is for Agile development teams and their Scrum Masters who want to explore and learn from the authors’ “dogfooding” experiences and their continuous adaptation of software requirements management. Product Owners and other stakeholders will also find value in this ebook by learning how they can support their Agile development teams and by gaining an understanding of the constraints of open-source community projects.

Below you’ll find the ebook’s Foreword and a few helpful sections from its Introduction:

Foreword

The ALM Rangers are a special group for several reasons. Not only are they innovative and focused on the real world, providing value-added solutions for the Visual Studio developer community, but they live and work in all four corners of the globe. The ALM Rangers are a volunteer organization. Talk about dedication! When we were offered the opportunity to write a foreword for this book, we knew we’d be part of something special.

The ALM Rangers don’t pontificate that they’ve found the one true way. This is practical advice and examples for producing great software by those who’ve done it and–most importantly–are still innovating and coding. Readers will find that they have virtual coworkers who share their experiences with honesty and humor, revealing learnings and what has worked for them. This doesn’t mean that this book lacks prescriptive guidance. The Rangers have embraced Visual Studio Online as their one and only home. They are evolving with the product, embracing open source software in GitHub to learn how successful OSS projects are run there and what the community values most. They’ve created an ecosystem that identifies the “low hanging fruit” and tracks it from idea to solution, and they never fail to recognize the Rangers and the ALM VPs who dedicate their personal time and passion to their OSS projects.

The extensive guidance shared here is not an end-to-end plan for everyone, although it could be used as a definitive guide for some teams. One of the many assets of this book is its organization into practical walkthroughs of typical ALM Ranger projects from idea to solution, presented as an easy to consume reference. Other bonuses are an appendix to quick-start your own project and reference checklists to keep you on track.

Among the authors, this book was called the “v1 dawn edition.” True to their core value of “learn from and share all experiences,” the ALM Rangers are always mindful that producing great software means continuous refinements from new learnings and feedback and that there will be more versions of this book. But first we invite you to immerse yourself in Managing Agile Open-Source Software Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Online.

In the true spirit of Agile, ongoing innovation,

Sam GuckenheimerClemri Steyn

Introduction
This book assumes that you have at least a minimal understanding of Agile, Lean, and Scrum development concepts and are familiar with Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Online (VSO). To go beyond this book and expand your knowledge of Agile practices or Visual Studio technologies, MSDN and other Microsoft Press books offer both complete introductions and comprehensive information.

This book might not be for you if …
This book might not be for you if you are looking for an in-depth discussion focused on the process, development, or architecture of software requirements, tooling, or practices.

Similarly, if you are looking for source code or guidance on ALM, DevOps, or proven and official frameworks such as Agile, Scrum and Kanban, this book will not be fully relevant, and we recommend that you consider these publications instead:

In new deployment scenarios you will need the TFS 2013 or 2012 on an windows 2012 R2 server, that will never support SharePoint 2010, so we need an SharePoint 2013 SP1, that support windows 2012 R2 for now.

Before Run all Windows Updates before installing SharePoint 2013, and get the CU updates of Sql2012 sp1 and SharePoint 2013 Sp1 .

If That box already has TFS 2013 on an windows 2012 R2 server . by Installing updates are the key steps that will prevent tantrums from SharePoint . Always, install of the required updates and ideally the optional ones also.

installation of SharePoint 2013 with Sp1

SharePoint Team They have really slicked up the installation process for SharePoint,

Instead use the auto-run that comes from running the DVD directly, or you can just run the “prerequisiteinstaller” from the root first.

When the prerequisites are complete you can start the installation proper and enter your key . If you get this wrong you will be next completing an uninstall to pick the right option. You can Avoid express at all costs and in this case we already have Team Foundation Server 2013 Sp1 installed and already have SQL Server 2012 sp2 installed.

Using configuration wizard will lead you through the custom config but if you are running on a local computer with no domain, like me, then you will have to run a command line to generate the database before you proceed.

Well, do not dispair because PowerShell –as always – is your friend. So just start the SharePoint 2013 management PowerShell console and use the cmdlet :

New-SPConfigurationDatabase

We have now a farm we can complete the configuration. Just work though the wizard as , although you are on your own if you select kerberos for single sign-on.

SharePoint 2013 SP1 will then run though its configuration steps and give you a functional, but empty SharePoint environment. At the end you get a simple Finish button and some instructions that you need to follow for getting your site to render in a browser.

Info: SharePoint 2013 works now in Chrome and other non Microsoft browsers…

Now you get almost 25 services that you can chose to install or not. If you leave them all ticked then you will get about 10-12 new databases in SQL, Its too hard to figure out what the dependencies are and what you need .

Configuring processes and extending can be long and will add solution into SharePoint. Will be a site template added but as it will likely look the nice new SharePoint 2013 Sp1 interface we will need to create the site manually.

Now that the SharePoint bits have been setup we will have a default link setup between SharePoint and Team Foundation Server. Although if we had a separate Team Foundation Server instance we would need to tell it where the TFS server is.

Info: You have to install the Extensions for SharePoint Products on every front end server for your SharePoint farm.

Now we have installed and configured the bits for SharePoint as well as telling it where the TFS server is we now need to tell TFS where to go.

There is no account listed as an administrator! I am using the Builtin\Administrator user as both the TFS Service Account and the SharePoint Farm Admin you don’t need one.

Site Configuration Collections

In order to have different sites for different collection and enable the ability to have the same Team Project name in multiple collection then you need to create a root collection site under the main site. Some folks like to create this at the ^/sites/[collection] level, but I always create the collection site as a sub site of the root. This have the benefit of creating automatic navigation between the sites…

This final test as when you click OK the Admin Console will go off and try to hook into, or create a site for us. if you do want to have a greater degree of separation between the sites and have them in different collections you can indeed do that as well. You may want to do that if you are planning to separate collection to multiple environments, but I can think of very few reasons that you would want to do that.

Using the new Team Project Site

If we create a new team project the template from the Process Template that you selected will be used to create the new site. These templates are designed to work in any version of SharePoint but they may look cool.

This team project was created before there was ever a SharePoint server so it has no portal. Lets go ahead and create one manually.

They have moved things around a little in SharePoint and we now create new sub sites from the “View Content” menu.

This, while much more hidden is really not something you do every day. You are much more likely to be adding apps to an existing site so having this more clicks away is not a big deal.

When we care the new site we have two options. We can create it using the provided “Team Foundation Project Portal” bit it results in a slightly ugly site, or you can use the default “Team Site” template to get a more native 2013 feel.

This is due to the features not yet being enables… so head on over to “cog | Site Settings | Site Actions | Manage site features” to enable them.

You can enable one of:

Agile Dashboards with Excel Reporting – for the MSF for Agile Software Development 6.x Process Template

CMMI Dashboards with Excel Reports – for the MSF for CMMI Software Development 6.x Process Template

The one you pick depends on the Process Template that you used to create the Team Project. I will activate the Scrum one as I used the Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 Recommended Process Template which I heartily recommend. You will have noticed that here are 2 or 3 for each of the “Agile | SMMI | Scrum” monikers and this is due to the different capabilities that you might have. For example:

Agile Dashboards – I have TFS with no Reporting Services or Analysis Services

Agile Dashboards with Basic Reporting – I have Reporting Services and Analysis Services but not SharePoint Enterprise

If you enable the highest level of the one you want it will figure out the one that you can run and in this case I can do “Scrum Dashboards with Reporting”.

Scrum template does not have any built in Excel Reports, but it does have Reporting Services reports. Now when I return to the homepage I get the same/similar portal you would have seen in old versions of SharePoint 2010.

Conclusion

Team Foundation Server 2013 & 2012 works with SharePoint 2013 Sp1 on Windows server 2012 R2 and we have manually created our Team Project Portal site.